Charles Dickens: A Life

In much of the English speaking world, Charles Dickens remains a literary force of nature and an endless source of fascination to writers and filmmakers. He wrote 15 major novels; we all know the names of at least some of them: Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations and Bleak House. His characters, from the Artful Dodger to Miss Havisham, Little Nell and Peggotty are part of our shared imagination. British writer Claire Tomalin is one of the great writers of biography. Her new book is Charles Dickens: A Life.

Transcript

Michael Cathcart: Charles Dickens, he is the writer who peopled the magnificent and cruel London of the Industrial Revolution, with some of literature's most memorable characters, the likes of Miss Havisham, Little Nell, and of course David Copperfield.

My guest this morning is the eminent British biographer Claire Tomalin. Her biographies include studies of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, and her magnificent biography of Samuel Pepys, and now this one, Charles Dickens: A Life. It is, I have to say, a total joy to read. On the occasion of Dickens' 200th birthday, Claire Tomlin joins me on the phone from London. Claire, welcome to Books and Arts Daily.

Claire Tomalin: Hello, it's wonderful to be talking to Australia, a country I adore, Michael in Melbourne, it is really, really great.

Michael Cathcart: Claire, your book makes it very clear that a great deal of the Dickensian world that we all know had its origins in Dickens' own childhood, and a key experience is his time in this place called the blacking factory, which I take it is a boot polish factory. What happened there?

Claire Tomalin: You're right, boot polish, he had to put the boot polish into jars and cover the jars and label them.

Michael Cathcart: And it had a huge impact on him.

Claire Tomalin: He was about 11. From the age of five to 11 he had a wonderful, happy, idyllic childhood. His father worked for the navy pay office and he was sent to a good school run by a good schoolmaster, Mr Giles, and he was seen to be a very clever, promising little boy. He read a great deal and he was a performer, he could sing and recite and he enjoys doing that, and he saw the world looking good.

Then his father was moved to London to work in London and they all went and squeezed into a small house in the poor part of London, Camden Town, and no one sent him to school, they seemed to have forgotten about their eldest son. So he was at home, cleaning his father's boots, looking after his many younger brothers and sisters, and then his father was in debt, his father couldn't manage, and then his father was taken off to the debtors prison.

And a kind friend of the family said, 'Oh well, we'll find some work for Charles,' and this is when the blacking factory came in. So he had to walk every day all the way from North London down to the banks of the River Thames where the factory was and just about where Charing Cross is now and work in this factory. First of all, it was pretty lonely and difficult for a little boy to manage his whole life, so it was a very crucial period in his life.

Michael Cathcart: And a time of shame really, he kept it quiet for many years.

Claire Tomalin: Yes, and one of the extraordinary things was that he never mentioned it to anyone until he told his best friend when he was growing up, John Forster, he said that neither his father nor his mother ever mentioned it again. So it was like a secret hanging in the air, everybody knew it had happened but nobody would mention it. I think that's part of the way a novelist's imagination gets formed.

Michael Cathcart: Charles Dickens' father it seems is the model for Mr Micawber in David Copperfield, everybody agrees on that, but can you tell me how you make that link between his fiction and his life? Because this is a bit of a fraught issue in literary biography, isn't it.

Claire Tomalin: I think that novelists in general don't actually draw from life but they take...they are acutely observant and they take what they need. Mr Micawber is obviously not exactly Dickens' father, and indeed in David Copperfield he is not David's father, he's just a friend. So he used some of his father's...his father spoke in a rather grand way, and indeed his father actually gave Micawber's advice: 'Income 20 shillings, expenditure 19 shillings and sixpence, result happiness. Income 20 shillings, expenditure 20 shillings and sixpence, result misery', and that was taken from life, Dickens' father. But the character of Mr Micawber was in other ways very different from his father. And he used his father again in his late novel, Little Dorrit, as William Dorrit who is actually in the Marshalsea prison. And again, he takes some aspects of his father but not others.

Michael Cathcart: Biographers should of course be careful about drawing these links between life and fiction. Sometimes they can draw very spurious conclusions by reading the fiction back onto the life. But in this case you are really helped because Dickens did spell out the links in letters.

Claire Tomalin: Dickens was the most wonderful letter writer, yes. It's a very curious thing, Dickens wouldn't have wanted any of his letters to be preserved, but in fact there are 12 volumes of his letters, and if you read them you get a wonderful picture of not only Dickens' life but what London life in the 19th century and also accounts of the time he spent living in Italy and Switzerland and visits to France and to America. So they are a treasure trove for any biographer.

Michael Cathcart: And he is living in an age of immense flux and vitality. I mean, revolution is breaking out in Europe, a tide of reform is sweeping through Britain, and quite early on he gets close to politics because he is a parliamentary reporter. But he doesn't seem all that impressed by what he sees.

Claire Tomalin: He hated the House of Commons, yes, he sat there taking down what they said, very interesting, of course they were debating things like the Poor Law Bill when the workhouses were set up. I think, and this is only my speculation, that he thought the House of Commons was too much like a club and that all the people spoke in the same voice, they all came from the same sort of schools and the same sort of background, and he didn't like that.

He declared himself to be a republican. One reason he wanted to go to America was to see a republic, to see democracy in action. And when the French had revolutions he was very supportive, he liked France, he likes the way of life in France. He was very critical of many aspects of English life.

Michael Cathcart: He really does have a social agenda. The Australian historian Manning Clark used to talk about people who looked on the world with the eye of pity, and it seemed to me that that described at least part of Dickens's view of the world.

Claire Tomalin: You're absolutely right. One of the things he said, again, when he arrived in America, he was writing to make it clear that the little people, the unimportant people, the despised people were just as interesting, just as important as the great people. So that runs through all his work and through all his activities in his life. It wasn't only that he wrote about the little people in his novels, he also did a lot of good works, raising money for instance for what were called mechanics institutes in the industrial cities where workers, men and women, could go and find libraries, reading rooms, lectures, get some education.

Michael Cathcart: And he founded a home for fallen women.

Claire Tomalin: He did indeed, with his friend Miss Coutts, a very rich and charitable woman whom Dickens advised, and that was the most extraordinary enterprise because he wanted to try and help street girls whose only way seemed to be prostitution. But he didn't want to do what most people did which was to preach at them and talk about religion, he wanted to show them that something better could be. And so the home was very nice and they were given attractive clothes and nice bedrooms, and he suggested that they should have their own little gardens where they could do gardening, they could have music, they could have books.

He wanted to show them that there was something else they could do. He didn't expect to get them all away from the lives that they'd grown up with because most of them had grown up in horrific circumstances, but he got a lot of them away. And his aim was that if they wished to they could emigrate to Australia, which indeed some of them did, or to Canada or to South Africa, and some of them did, and some of them did reform their lives and got married and had children. It is one of the very touching and impressive things that Dickens did.

Michael Cathcart: That's a very active involvement in that issue, prostitution I mean. But prostitutes don't seem to show up so much in the books.

Claire Tomalin: Well, they do show up but they are not very realistic, this is one of the very odd things. Nancy in Oliver Twist, Martha in David Copperfield, Alice in Dombey…I mean, they speak in a funny language. I think Dickens found it difficult to write about them and he tends to give them theatrical language, and they tend to strike their bosoms, and Martha says, 'To the river, to the river,' you know, she thinks she must throw herself in the river because she is so ashamed of what she does. This is not, on the whole, what the girls Dickens worked with were like.

Michael Cathcart: Alice in Dombey is really there to make a moral point, isn't she, she is the cousin of Edith who is married to Dombey, she has married Dombey for money, and Alice is a prostitute, and it's as if he's saying these are really just two forms of prostitution.

Claire Tomalin: Absolutely, you're absolutely spot-on. And Edith is not very realistic either, is she. Remember she strikes her bosom and she says to Florence, 'I'm no good,' and she rushes from the house.

Michael Cathcart: I've never seen any woman strike her bosom, now you point it out Claire.

Claire Tomalin: No, I know, I go around looking for it.

Michael Cathcart: Things really took off for him with The Pickwick Papers in 1836, in fact a big year for Charles Dickens. Tell us what they were and why they were so popular.

Claire Tomalin: Yes, The Pickwick Papers was his first novel. Let's just go back a little bit, he left school at 15, went back to school two years after the blacking factory, then his father was in financial trouble again, he had to leave school for good. He went off to be an office boy, a clerk in a lawyer's office. Nine years later this uneducated boy was famous as the author of The Pickwick Papers which everybody was reading in England. And his ascent is extraordinary, and he did it by teaching himself shorthand and he became, as you've already said, first a legal reporter then a parliamentary reporter and a newspaper reporter.

He began to write little sketches of London life and he gave them to papers and magazines and they were very popular, so he began to sell them. And then an enterprising publisher said, 'Will you write something for us?' They had a popular illustrator called Robert Seymour who wanted to do some drawings of sporting life. And so Dickens, who was wanting to get married, saw that the money they were offering would let him get married, and he immediately had an idea for The Pickwick Papers.

And of course he very quickly took it away from being a tale of sporting life, and Dickens introduced first Mr Jingle, a wonderfully funny character and actor who talked in an amazing staccato way, and then Sam Weller who becomes Mr Pickwick's servant. And this is one of the great couples in literature, the rotund, benevolent Mr Pickwick, fat, amiable, glasses, getting into scrapes, and Sam Weller, the worldly young man who saves his master from misfortune and is very, very witty and absolutely makes everybody laugh.

Michael Cathcart: It's not only the characters I love in The Pickwick Papers, it's the whole culture of the Pickwickians who are a kind of learned society, aren't they.

Claire Tomalin: Well, they pretend to be a learned society, but actually they are just four jolly men who like travelling about together and enjoying themselves. And in fact it gets darker as it goes along because Mr Pickwick is accused of breach of promise by his London landlady, encouraged by a crooked lawyer, and he gets sent to prison. Prisons crop up a lot in Dickens, I think as a result of his father having been in prison. It is an absolutely wonderful book.

Michael Cathcart: When you say it is a marvellous book...I mean, now it is a book...my Penguin copy is a huge, fat book, I was surprised to realise just what a big, fat book it was when I retrieved it from my bookcase. But of course it came out in instalments.

Claire Tomalin: All Dickens' books came out in instalments, and the thing about The Pickwick Papers, they came out monthly with paper wrappers, so they were very cheap, and English publishing was changed because it meant that poor people could buy these novels because they came in these instalments and didn't cost much and they could actually collect the instalments and have the novels in their houses. And somebody said, I think in the middle of Pickwick, that when Dickens was publishing, it wasn't just a literary event, it was news when a new instalment came out. And when he was writing The Old Curiosity Shop, people in America were standing on the quays waiting for the boats to come in to find out whether Little Nell was alive or dead.

Michael Cathcart: Let's talk about Little Nell because she is such a phenomenon. How did Little Nell come about?

Claire Tomalin: Well, Dickens was actually trying to write something quite different, he was trying to get time off from writing a novel by editing a magazine, but the magazine didn't go very well and he realised what everybody wanted was another novel. So he turned what was a little sketch about an innocent little girl with an old grandfather, he turned it into a serial novel, and he had to write just as he went along. And his great friend, John Forster, suggested to him that what would be really good would be if Nell was 13 years old, a sweet, charming, pretty, guileless child, if he killed her off at the end. And Dickens took this suggestion, because he got very, very emotionally involved in it, and there are wonderful letters in his letters in which he talks about how he's suffering, how terrible it is, he's going to have to kill off the child and how will he do it. While this was happening, one of his friends, MacReady's real little daughter died, and Dickens could hardly take any notice of that because he was completely absorbed in the imaginary death of Little Nell.

Michael Cathcart: Not only could he take no notice of that, but when Forster went to the funeral and came back upset, Dickens was really quite put out by Forster's display of grief.

Claire Tomalin: You're right, absolutely, it's a wonderful moment to think about when novelists...of course this is how novelists work, this is his own creation, as real to him as people.

Michael Cathcart: Yes, you say that, but the death scene of Little Nell these days does seem a bit mawkish or melodramatic, doesn't it?

Claire Tomalin: I slightly defend Dickens...he gets laughed at a lot for his deaths of children and Paul Dombey, but he did have an object. Victorian parents often lost children. We are not used to our children dying in our generation, but in the 19th century it was very usual to lose children, and Dickens wanted something to console people, he wanted to give them something which might help them. And I think in describing Little Nell and then Paul Dombey, this is what his aim was, that he should give parents something they could read and feel...they could sort of share the suffering. And I think people did. He got letters from people saying that they had been consoled and helped by reading about these deaths.

Michael Cathcart: Just to stay with that point for a moment, he also seems to me to regard childhood as if it's a right, which is a novel idea but an important idea, one that we now take for granted.

Claire Tomalin: You mean a right, r-i-g-h-t?

Michael Cathcart: Yes, it's a right…

Claire Tomalin: That people have a right to be innocent children?

Michael Cathcart: That people have a right when they are aged between five and 12 or five and 14 to have something that we would now call a childhood. And characters like the Artful Dodger, for all their feistiness, are children who are having to make do with a life in which childhood has been denied them.

Claire Tomalin: You're absolutely right, it was very important to Dickens. He said in a note he wrote for The Old Curiosity Shop in a proof which was unpublished but it is there in his notes, that childhood has to be bought and paid for. That is, only if you're rich can you have a childhood. And remember, he was living before the Factory Act was passed and the plight of poor children was absolutely terrible, they were put to work in the mines, they were put to work in the mills, they were put to work in the factories. London was full of children who had either no parents or neglectful parents.

And another thing Dickens supported was called the ragged schools (there was no state education) where people tried to give something to these children. And people who ran them said often the children would be in and out of prison, and they'd come back to the ragged school after not being there for two weeks and saying, 'I was in prison.' They were pickpockets like the Artful Dodger, they were child prostitutes. And Dickens did deeply, deeply care always. Over and over again in his novels there are child workers.

If you think of Little Charley in Bleak House, little girl, parents dead, younger brother and baby, she keeps them in a locked room, one room she has in a lodging house, and locks them up and goes out and earns her living doing washing. She is about 13 years old and she spends the day washing and serving for families, and comes back. And she is keeping the family.

Michael Cathcart: Let's talk about Dickens' relationship to publishers, because it seems to be a bit of a nightmare really. How did he get himself into such a tangle?

Claire Tomalin: Well, he got himself into a tangle because his ascent as a writer was so rapid. So while he was writing The Pickwick Papers there were three other publishers trying to get a bit of him, trying to sign contracts with him and offering him good money. And he couldn't cope with that. And when he made friends with Forster he asked Forster to deal with publishers for him. And Dickens got enraged because his success was so unpredicted, so that he signed what looked like a good contract, and then he would see that in fact his books were selling in far greater numbers than anyone had guessed, so he was constantly saying, with some justice, that his publishers were making huge amounts of money and he was sweating away working every month and not getting very much. So he quarrelled with his publishers a great deal.

Michael Cathcart: When he was just 25 he was writing Pickwick and Oliver Twist at the same time the different publishers.

Claire Tomalin: That's right, and then when he finished Pickwick he started writing Nickleby. Again, each month he was writing two different novels instalments.

Michael Cathcart: I don't know whether I should admire the man or think that he's mad. Who on earth thinks it's a good idea to write two novels at once for two different publishers?

Claire Tomalin: Well, he was establishing himself, and he was a man of prodigious energy. You know, his old schoolmaster sent him an engraved snuffbox saying 'To Boz…' ('Boz' was his penname), 'To Boz the inimitable'. And Dickens called himself 'the inimitable' afterwards, and people said it was just a joke of course, but I say in my book I don't think it really was a joke, I think he knew he was inimitable, that nobody was like him, nobody could rival him, nobody ever has.

Michael Cathcart: How early do you reckon he knew that?

Claire Tomalin: I think he got to know it with Pickwick. He adored Pickwick, and Pickwick has always outsold all his other books.

Michael Cathcart: What was it do you think that drew his audience in? Is he read by people of all classes or does he particularly appeal to working-class readers?

Claire Tomalin: Well, he was read and is read by all classes, but you are right, I think he always appealed to the lower middle class, and indeed the working class. And with his later novels, some of the upper middle class people were rather suspicious of him because he attacked the law, he attacked the civil service, he attacked politicians and financiers. So I think there is a sort of certain suspicion of Dickens. I've noticed that most of my friends who happened to have gone to Eton, in my generation, none of them seem to have read Dickens, which really surprised me.

Michael Cathcart: Well, if you're a high Tory, his politics could seem a little alarming, I suppose.

Claire Tomalin: Yes, indeed.

Michael Cathcart: I was astonished by another story that you tell in your marvellous book, and this is about how he used his fame as a writer to try curing a woman using hypnotism. This is a very bizarre interlude.

Claire Tomalin: Yes, well, Dickens was someone who got obsessed with things, and he had a friend, a doctor in London who was a hypnotist, or they called it mesmerism more often. Dickens found he could hypnotise people, and he got completely carried away by this. And when they were living in Italy, they took a year in Italy living in Genoa, one of the friends they made there, a Swiss banker, had a partly English wife who had all sorts of neurotic symptoms which made it very difficult for her to live an ordinary life. And he was called Emile de la Rue, and he invited Dickens to treat her. And Dickens was very chuffed and he started to treat her.

And she was of course...he was this great English writer, a very attractive man, and Dickens had some success with her. But the situation got rather out of hand and she became incredibly dependent on him. Dickens would go into her bedroom in the night to help her, and Catherine Dickens, Mrs Dickens, who was actually pregnant, as usual, and was hoping to have a nice time with her husband in Italy, got quite angry and jealous...

Michael Cathcart: As you would.

Claire Tomalin: As you would. And Dickens never quite forgave her. I mean, a couple of years later he was in Italy again and he wrote to Catherine and said she was to write a nice letter to the de la Rues and make it clear that she was friendly to them. He could be very dictatorial.

Michael Cathcart: Claire, if he was part of your circle of friends now or circle of acquaintances, is he a man that you would like?

Claire Tomalin: I find him deeply lovable. He could be very difficult. I think to go to dinner with him, to go for a 12-mile walk with him, if I could keep up, would be wonderful. To walk around Kent or London with him would be marvellous because he was so observant, he was so enthusiastic. To go on holiday probably would be great fun. I think to be part of his domestic circle might be a little difficult.

Michael Cathcart: You say that Dickens didn't like to part with his characters at the end of his novels. I'm sorry to leave his life and his biographer, but we must go. Claire, thank you for your time, it's been just a lovely to talk to you.

Claire Tomalin: Well, Michael, thank you, I hope we can talk again.

Michael Cathcart: Claire Tomalin, speaking to us there on Books and Arts Daily here on RN. Claire's book is called Charles Dickens: A Life, and is published by Penguin Viking.

Guests

Claire Tomalin

Writer. Author of Charles Dickens: A Life and (previously), The Invisible Woman (an account of Dickens’ relationship with actor Ellen Ternan), as well as biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Samuel Pepys.

Publications

Title

Charles Dickens: A Life

Author

Claire Tomalin

Publisher

Penguin Viking

Credits

Producer

Kate Evans

Comments (5)

Patricia Wiltshire :

07 Feb 2012 12:08:53pm

Nice to hear Charles Dickens gets a mention on his birthday, though it is a pity more noteworthy biographies from which Claire Tomalin has drawn for her book were barely mentioned. Perhaps the ABC doesn't know that there is a Melbourne Branch of the Dickens Fellowship that is holding a Dinner in honour of the great author this Saturday night? They are an interesting bunch - though modest. Perhaps this is why we never hear much about them, though the new Australian focus on RN could perhaps stretch to include a considerable interest in Dickens amongst its population?

Peter :

07 Feb 2012 1:54:25pm

I was unable to hang on your every word today and so I may have missed it but I am intrigued by the modern habit of overlooking the great man's domestic eccentricities and peccadillos. It is also somewhat surprising that no-one today reflects on the quality of the writing. Before the second world war Dickens was revered as a story teller but not as a literary figure. That distinction between journalist/serialist and serious novelist, is almost never expressed today. And in considering his output and influence one might do well to consider the work of Ben Elton. His capacity to integrate comedy with serious themes, in a wide range of formats and prodigious quantity is really quite formidable. There is much more to Dickens and his work than seems to meet the eye and ear.

theo :

RonPrice :

08 Feb 2012 2:01:37pm

Dickens suffered from clinical depression, as documented in: (1) The Key to Genius: Manic Depression and the Creative Life by D. Jablow Hershman and Julian Lieb, as well as (2) Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph by EdgarJohnson.----------- TOTALLY CONCEALED

Dickens was asked what he meant when he said he did not understand himself. He said that he never really understood what he meant. “What do my novels mean?” “They mean only that I have finished them and, in the act of completion, some new truth is revealed. Dickens saw himself as a mystery too deep to fathom. His books he felt as if they had been written by someone else. -Ron Price with thanks to Charles Dickens in Charles Dickens: A Biography, Peter Ackroyd, pp.754-755.

Some mystery,some leaven,some power,and so I write,a poetic voice,for that is me,something from souls,faithful souls,gone to the great beyond,but linkedso unobtrusively,so seductively,as to remainforever,utterly mysterious,totally concealedin each melody.

Ron Price12 September 1999-----------------------Updated for ABC RN on the celebration of the 200th anniversary of Dickens' birth in 1812.

Charles dickens :

30 Sep 2014 5:47:59am

I have a book written by Charles dickens called the life of our lord, written for his children. I heard on the radio someone talking about. Him. I do not know the presenters name or the phone no to call. It was about 4am. I would have liked to call in but was too sleepy - is this of any interest to the presenter.